Friday, August 31, 2018

PA: Better Than a Graduation Test

Pennsylvania's end of the year test faces a new challenge from the legislature, and if you're in the Keystone State, you may want to give your favorite legislator a call.

In Pennsylvania, we actually have two flavors of the Big Standardized Test that everyone is mandated to inflict on students as a means of evaluation schools and teachers. For the elementary and eight grade students, we have the PSSA test. But our high school students take the Keystone exam.

There are many problems with the Keystone Exam. If I were still in the classroom, I would be forbidden by law and by the test-givers "code of ethics" to so much as look at the test, but now that I'm retired I can tell you that it has problems such as questions that are essentially vocabulary quizzes. I can also tell you that it's fond of questions where it gives the student a reasonably familiar word in an unusual context and asks the student to define the word based on context; this kind of "gotcha" question is a common feature. The Keystone, like many such BS Tests, likes the mind-reading in which students are supposed to discern the author's purpose. It also likes the "which sentence is best" question. All poorly written and designed not to see what the students know, but to trick the students into selecting the wrong answer.

Not that students feel the need to engage in this battle with the test writers, because the Keystones are zero-stakes tests for students.

Yes, in Pennsylvania, teachers and schools are evaluated based on a test that means nothing to the students taking it.

Now, that's not entirely by design. We were going to phase these in and after a couple of years, the tests would be a state graduation requirement for Pennsylvania students. But then that deadline approached, and legislators realized that a huge number of Pennsylvania students would be kept from getting a diploma for no reason other than this test that the state was making them take. And so legislators have flinched several times and pushed back the year in which students will have to pass the Keystone Exams. There are three-- reading, math and biology-- although there were going to be many more until it turned out that creating all those tests would be both hard and expensive. The whole history of testing in PA is the story of the ship of grand aspirations run aground on the hard shoals of reality.

Anyway, we're still in a holding pattern, waiting for the moment when the legislature thinks that more students will be above average. Okay, not exactly: The Keystone exams are theoretically standards-referenced, which should mean that everyone can pass. But it should also mean that we can get test results literally five minutes after the student finishes the test, but we're still waiting months. Why is that? Maybe because of something called scaling, which seems like a fancy way to explain different weights for different questions on different forms of the test. Or maybe it has to do with rangefinding, which seems an awful lot like norm-referencing-- collect answers and see what their distribution looks like. I get into all that more here.

Last year the legislature and governor (who are not always best buds) opened up an alternative route for career and technical students-- CTE students could prove their career readiness through tests actually related to their careers. For instance, welding students take a variety of tests to become certified as welders; Pennsylvania now says that's good enough to graduate, never mind the Keystones.

Now Senator Thomas McGarrigle is back with a bill that proposes other ways to take some of the bite out of the Keystone Exams, based on a fully sensible premise: recognizing that "success after graduation looks different for each student and that requiring a high-stakes, one-size-fits-all pathway to graduation does not provide an accurate representation of students’ abilities or likelihood for success in the future."

What are the specifics of the SB1095?

Composite Scoring

Rather than scoring "proficient" on all three tests, the bill would call for a satisfactory combined score from all three. Students could score "proficient" on just one test and "basic" on the other two. The secretary of education will set the satisfactory score and it will take an act of the General Assembly to change it.

Another Delay

Originally the Class of 2017 was going to have to pass the Keystones to graduate. Currently the Class of 2020 would be the first. This bill kicks the can down to 2021.

Supplemental Instruction

The school can offer extra instruction to students who don't make it (but the school may not require it). That extra schooling is not allowed to interfere with their regular schooling; in other words, the infamous practice of pulling a student out of regular courses for a bunch of test prep remediation is banned. Telling a vocational student that he can't attend his vocational classes until he's finished remediating is banned. The school can give the student a chance to supplement his instruction, but they may not hold his real education hostage to do so. This is a Good Thing.

This, Because...?

"No public school entity may be required to offer, nor may any student be required to participate in or complete, a project-based assessment as provided for in 22 Pa. Code 4.51c."

The Special Ed Loophole

A student with special needs who completes the requirements of his IEP but doesn't "otherwise meet the requirements of this section" must be given a regular high school diploma. Of course, any school can screw with this by writing Keystone Exam proficiency into the IEP. Smart parents will refuse, and smart schools will go along and wink wink nudge nudge some opting out, since that lets them drop some of the lowest test-takers' scores from the school evaluation.

A Whole Pack Of Alternative Assessments

A student "will be deemed proficient" if she does both of the following:

1)  Gets good grades in the "associated academic content areas of the Keystone Exams." These "grade-based requirements" are locally set.


2) Any of the following:

Gets a recommended-by-the-secretary score on the appropriate AP or IB exams

Gets an ASVAB score sufficient to qualify for military enlistment

Shows official notification that they will enter a registered apprenticeship program after high school

Gets a secretary-approved score on the SAT or ACT

Shows they've been accepted by "an accredited nonprofit institution of higher learning

Some other piece of compelling evidence that shows the student is ready for college, career, or the military


The Secretary of Education is directed to report on how all this is working out.

One Weird Piece of Leverage

All of these alternatives are listed as existing in any year that the Keystone Exams are required for graduation. Which means, I presume, that if the Keystones are never required for graduation, all the rest of this stuff evaporates.

Who Likes This

The Pennsylvania School Board Association likes this. PSEA likes this. The PA Senate has already unanimously liked it, and now we're just waiting on the House.

And really, everyone should like this, because it takes the radical step of trying to judge college and career readiness by means other than a Big Standardized Test that's not even a very good test. If you're looking at all the alternative paths and thinking that under this bill pretty much nobody would need to take the BS Test, well, yes, I think you're correct-- and that's a good thing. Or to put it another way, why would we want to tell a student who has passed all their required classes, been accepted to college, or already started on a work or military plan that all that is going to be thrown out because of the results of a single standardized test.

No, this isn't perfect. And yes, there are a million conversations we need to have about the whole "college and career ready" issue. And yes, the SAT and ACT are probably not a great measure of anything, either. But it is still a huge improvement.

If you are in PA, this page has a simple link for sending your representative a note to support this bill. And here's another one. The bill is currently trapped in committee and needs to be sent out for a vote soon. This is soon. Send your note now.

Note. Some local school district administrations will grumble because in anticipation of the state's eventual action, many local districts have made the Keystones a local graduation requirement, even though the state never said they had to. Some may grump that this will require them to retool their system. Tough. If their system counts the Keystones as a graduation requirement, their system is seriously flawed and they should be delighted to have the chance to fix it.

Education Writers Association's Balance Problem

Education Writers Association (EWA) is just what it says-- the association of the various journalists and reporters who cover education (but not bloggers-- just legitimate journalists, and no, I'm not bitter at all). It contains some great writers and reporters who do some excellent and invaluable work.

But it does seem at times that education coverage in this country suffers from a reform tilt. Various reformsters are regularly quoted; actual teachers and folks on the defending public ed side of the debates, not so much. I have joked that there is a federal law that says no education story may be published until it includes a quote from Mike Petrilli (Fordham).

Here's a document that is either a symptom or a contributing factor; EWA keeps a list of sources that writers can turn to when they need someone to call or quote on a particular subject. It is not a balanced list, nor is it necessarily accurate. The heading says that this is a "tool to help you find experts on hundreds of topics in education." But the list seriously blurs the line between those who are experts on a topic and those who are advocates for a particular policy or position.

Here are some of the groups represented:

Thomas B. Fordham Institute is represented by five people, plus another four who are connected to it.

American Enterprise Institute is represented by six people, plus three more with connections.

Bellwether Education Partners is represented by three people, plus two connections.

NewSchools Venture Fund has three people listed, plus two connections.

Education Trust has five people, plus numerous other connections.

Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education has five people on the list.

TNTP's Kenya Bradshaw is listed as well as Center for Education Reform's Jeanne Allen. So is Peter Cunningham of Education Post. Several of the CANs are represented as well. Almost twenty from New America, a thinky tank that has cozy relationships with its corporate funders. Achieve has four "experts" and many alumni. And a couple dozen Teach for America alumni, including familiar names like Cami Anderson and Chris Barbic. Oh, and David Bornstein reps for Solutions Journalism Network, the project set up by Gate specifically to provide journalistic PR for his projects. And there's Nina Rees for the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools. EdWorks. CAP. Tom Vander Ark. Kevin Chavous. Richard Whitmire is a source without affiliation, a former president of EWA who wrote book-long love letters to Rocketrship Academy and She Who Will Not Be Named, former head of DC schools. The list goes on and on.

All of these groups are primarily advocacy groups, professional lobbyists for the education reform movement. Most of them do not conduct any sort of research, but simply issue position papers that are an attempt to make a case for whatever position they are advocating. Very few of these experts have ever spent real time inside a classroom.

Are there voices from the non-reform side of the tracks? Sure-- Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris, Jose Luis Vilson, Bruce Baker, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Helen Gym, Barmak Nassirian, Andre Perry. Probably some other names I missed or don't know.

You see the problem.

There are tons of colleges and universities represented, and if I had time I could try to sort out what side each individual department has staked itself out on.  Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten are on the list. There are some folks who can claim some degree of expertise in what they do, but whose allegiances and bias are no mystery, like Eva Moskowitz and Doug Harris. There are plenty of people who represent particular businesses like PARCC or American Institutes for Research and some charter school operators.

There are many charter schools and chains represented. I found one public school classroom teacher (Timothy Meegan of Chicago).

Imagine that. An entire list of sources for writing stories about education, and little-to-no representation of public school classroom teachers.

The list can be filtered by topic, and no matter what topic you pick, you find some academians, a bunch of pro-reform advocates, maybe a pro-public ed person or two, and virtually nobody who is dealing with the topic as it relates to students in a classroom.

It's an unbalanced list. It's not just that it's heavily tilted in favor of Reformsters (though it is). It is also tilted in favor of politics over education. In a way this is not surprising; it's analogous to the horse raciness of political coverage, where reporters discuss whether the poverty bill of Senator Barpswaggle will get past Senator Whippensnot and what that means for the future of the political parties, but not a word about whether or not the bill is a valid approach to dealing with poverty. This list is best suited for people who want to discuss how well a particular ed policy is doing, but not how well it should be doing. This is a list for reporters who want to just report the school achievement numbers they're given without asking hard questions about how results of a single standardized test can tell us how good a school is (and whether or not the standardized test is good for anything at all).

Looking at the list crystalizes some things for me. I've often noted that the ed reform folks have large numbers of people who are well-paid to do nothing but sit around and push their policies-- this list shows how well that's working for them, and how far that puts them ahead of those of us who are "just" teachers, or former teachers, sitting at home blogging for free. It also shows how some ed journalism can be so hugely unbalanced, as if reform is an overwhelming, unstoppable, inevitable feature of the education landscape-- but then, when ed journalists look out into the world of sources, mostly what they see is reform and the pretty pictures that reform advocates paint for them.

Maybe I'm over-reacting. Maybe nobody who belongs to EWA actually uses this list. Maybe most education journalists actually personally know several working public school classroom teachers, and they call them for perspective all the time. Maybe.

And there are certainly many journalists working the education beat who do an excellent and well-balanced job, and they are a service and benefit to all of us. We, in turn, can make it a point to amplify and support their work.

If however, you're like me and you find this a bit discouraging, there is something you can do. On the source list page, there is a link for joining the source list. It warns that all additions are at the discretion of EWA, so we could all be rejected. But if you think you have valid expertise in the field of education and you think journalists researching stories ought to be talking to people like you (and you count as a person like you), then sign yourself up. The worst that could happen is that they'll say no, but the best that can happen is that you'll provide some enterprising journalist with a contact that will help them tell a better story. Help them out. Do your part.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

How To Profit from Your Non-Profit Charter School

Occasionally politicians and policy leaders will try to thread the needle on charter schools by saying that they support nonprofit charters, but not those for-profit ones. Candidate Clinton tried that trick for keeping both sides happy back in 2016. But it's a distinction without a difference. Running a nonprofit charter school can still be a highly lucrative undertaking-- all financed with taxpayer dollars.

Here's how to make a bundle with your nonprofit charter school.

The Real Estate Business

There is such a thing as a business that specializes in charter schools and real estate. In some states, the government will help finance a real estate development if it's a charter school, and in general developers have noted an abundance of cash. Though, as one charter real estate loan bond financier told the Wall Street Journal, "There's a ton of capital coming into the industry. The question is: Does it know what it's doing?" Many states have found a problem with charters that lease their buildings from their own owners as well.
Why such interest in charter real estate? One reason: the Clinton-era Community Tax Relief Act of 2000 made it possible for funds that invested in charter schools to double their money in seven years. And the finance side can become so convoluted that, as Bruce Baker lays out here, the taxpayers can end up paying for a building twice-- and the building still ends up belonging to the charter company.

Management Companies

Once you've set up your nonprofit charter school, hire yourself as a for-profit charter management organization. Over the last decade, there have been numerous examples of this arrangement, sometimes called a "sweeps contract," where the charter school hands as much as 95% of its revenue off to a for-profit management organization. As with real estate, there have been instances where the school's assets (books, furniture, computers, etc) have been ruled to be the property of the management company-- so even if the school tanks, the organizers walk away with assets they can cash in.
Not every CMO is run by the same folks who own the charter school, but it's not an uncommon arrangement. Eagle Arts Academy in Florida not only paid its founder to develop a curriculum, but paid him for the rights to the school's name and logo.

Depending on your state, some of this is legal and some of it might not be. If we get into the grey areas, then we start seeing some really crazy stuff, like the Gulen charters. One of the largest chains in the US, the Gulen charters are connected to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious opposition leader. The schools have been dogged by controversy, including allegations that their mostly-Turkish immigrant faculty are required to kick a portion of their salaries back to the movement. The Gulen schools are potentially using US taxpayer money to finance a government-in-exile. These schools are mostly nonprofit charters.

Charter schools, whether nominally for-profit or nonprofit, face the same basic problem-- they are businesses that do not control how much they charge for the service they provide. This means that every dollar spent on students is one dollar less to go into the bank account of the business; the interests of the students and the interests of the businesses involved in the school are in opposition to each other.

Nor can you assume that the laws protect taxpayer dollars in any meaningful way. In some states, the laws against self-dealing are strong and well-enforced. In other states, not so much. Eagle Arts Academy is a disaster by any measure, and local school authorities know it-- but state law does not give them, or anyone else, the clear authority to shut it down.

There are charter schools out there that are neither directly nor indirectly attempting to profit from the taxpayers via the students they are supposed to serve. But if you are shopping for a charter school for your child, knowing that it's nonprofit is not enough. Ask if there is a for-profit business operating the school, and if there is, think twice. If that for-profit business is operated by the same people that run the school, don't think twice-- just walk away.
Originally posted at Forbes.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

What Privatization Really Means

We're living through an unprecedented age of privatization, filled with ongoing attempts to turn public spaces and public institutions into privately owned and operated businesses.

The first impulse is to ascribe this to corruption and greed-- surely the goal of privatization is to grab more money, to profit from institutions and endeavors that used to be for the shared public good.

But that doesn't entirely scan. The accusations are common, but I don't believe that Betsy DeVos is in the secretary of education's chair because she sensed a money-making opportunity-- certainly nothing that would make a perceptible difference to her family fortune. I don't think Bill Gates is one of the point men on the privatization of education for the benjamins; the man already has more money than he will ever spend.

Are people pursuing privatization simply out of a desire to rake in mountains of money?

I don't think so.

It's mine. All mine. 
You can look at Donald Trump, who, I would argue, has privatized the office of the President. Sure, this lifelong grifter is finding plenty of ways to make a buck from the office, but not everything he's doing is about money. He'd like to arrest Omarosa for running her mouth. He likes to hire and fire based on loyalty. He threatens Google because he doesn't like his self-googling results. He doesn't want to keep the flag lowered for John McCain because he never liked John McCain. None of this is about money; it's about exercising his personal will, making what should be public Presidential decisions based on his private personal preferences.

We've heard it over and over in the modern ed reform movement-- schools should be run more like businesses. Yes, that means watching the money side of things, but it also consistently means, "I want to be able to run this school like my own personal private business. I don't want the government to tell me there are rules I have to follow. I don't want unions telling me what I can or can't do. I just want to exert my will, unfettered and unrestrained, like I would over any personal, private operation I owned."

Throughout the Trump administration, in fact, we've seen a rush to do away with government regulations and "protections." But Betsy DeVos won't get richer because she canceled oversight of the predatory for-profit college industry. She's just making the world work more like she thinks it should, with business owners able to exercise their personal, private will over the things they own.

Privatization is not (just) about profiteering. It's about the exercise of will. It's about being able to treat public goods like private property, and about being able to exercise more unrestrained will over private property.

It's important to understand this, because if we simply look for profit motive, we'll miss much of the privatization that's taking place. Modern venture philanthropy doesn't have nearly as much to do with profiteering as it does with buying influence and compliance. Bill Gates appointed himself the Chief of Education in the United States, and he never had to stand for election. This is the Reed Hastings (Netflix) approach-- there shouldn't be elected school boards; those of us who know better should just be in charge.

Charter schools do not have to be operated as a private business. We've been hoodwinked into thinking that private ownership and operation is somehow a defining feature of charter schooling. There's no reason it has to be. But for the privatizers, that's really the only detail that matters-- the public school should be operated as a private possession.

Yes, money matters. It matters as a means of keeping and exercising power, and it's also a means of keeping score-- if I'm filthy rich, that proves that I'm wiser, smarter, better than. "Follow the money" doesn't just mean to follow the flow to the beneficiary, but also to follow the strings and see who is pulling them.

At its root, privatization is about taking possession of spaces and institutions that used to be shared public good. Your hospital is no longer a shared community service-- it now belongs to somebody. Your schools are not a shared community good-- they are now someone's possessions. The privatization dream is without boundaries. Let us own the roads. Let us own the water supplies and services. When we want to, let us take possession of the land. In a privatized world, everything belongs to somebody (certified worthy by his wealth), and that somebody is free to exercise his will over his possessions as he wishes. That somebody doesn't have to stand for elections, though elections themselves have been privatized, just as your tax dollars have been privatized, earmarked for the people who now possess the services and institutions that used to be operated by government on behalf of the public who once owned them. The 1% don't simply want more money-- they want to be in charge, and they don't want to have to listen to the 99% backseat driving.

Privatization is not (just) about profiteering. It's about the rich taking possession of a country and all its assets. It's about dividing society into people who get to exercise their own personal will and those who will have to decide whether to comply or resist, because they no longer have a voice.

Resistance to privatization can't just be about asking, "So who will make money on this deal." We also need to be asking, "So, once this has happened, who will be the decider? Who will decide who gets treated at the hospital? Who will decide who and what get taught at the school? Who will decide when the roads are plowed and paved? And what can I do if I don't like their decision?" The pitch will always be, "Well, the government decides that stuff now and they do a lousy job, amiright?" That may be true, but it doesn't answer the question. Get an answer to the question, because we're seeing the answer demonstrated right now in the White House-- "I'll decide. I'm the only one that matters. I'll decide, and if you don't like it, tough, and if you complain, I'll find some way to use my personal power to punish you."

Privatization isn't always about money, but it is always about power. This country was set up so that power would be hard to get and hard to keep and hard to exercise without restraint. Privatization is about getting past all of that, and back to modern version of feudalism. We should keep resisting.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Are You Ready for the First Day

This week will see the first day for the school year in many communities. Time to ask teachers this question:

Do you feel prepared?

Periodically we get a survey of teachers about this question, and typically a fairly large number of teachers say, "No, I don't-- or didn't-- feel prepared when I first stepped into a class room."

This is most typically offered as evidence that teacher preparation programs are stinky and need to be overhauled or replaced. I'm never going to declare that no teacher preparation programs are stinky (a few, in fact, are extraordinarily stinky), but I do think the survey results have an alternate meaning.

I had 39 first days of school in my career, and I never felt fully prepared for any of them.

There are plenty of reasons for that. For one, even if you've taught in the same school for your whole career, even if you know some of your incoming students by reputation or even previous contact, you never know what a class is going to be like until you are dealing with them, and even then it will take a few weeks, minimum, to lock things in. You can have big plans for your content, your pace, your scope and sequence, even things like how you're going to organize the room this year. But your students will be deciding which parts of the wish list you call a plan are actually going to happen. And you won't know until you know. This does not change, ever. You just develop a clearer picture of what range your classes are most likely (but not certain) to fall within.

Another reason to feel less than fully prepared is because you're not a dope. Seriously. If you walk toward your first day of school (whether it's your first or your twentieth) thinking, "I have nothing to worry about because I have a total lock on this and I'm prepared for everything," then you simply don't understand the situation. Nor do you understand yourself.

A good teacher can tell you the list of things she needs to work on. One of the surest signs that someone is a lousy teacher is anything along the lines of, "I've got this class down to a science now and I can just breeze through like a well-oiled machine. There's nothing I really need to work on-- I've got this down pat." Those are the words of a lousy teacher.

A good teacher is always working on getting better, because a good teacher always feels, acutely, where she is coming up short. It's what many teachers focus on, perhaps excessively. Teachers have a tendency to be humble, and that may be part of the professional ethic, but teachers are often focused on the very things they need to be humble about, and not their areas of mighty excellence.

My first choice for a teacher will always be one who answers, "I'm not sure. There's so much more I want to do before that first day, so many things I'm not positive about" over a teacher who answers, "Totally prepared. Haven't even thought about the first day because I'm so totally ready."

Teaching is a profession of limits. There's never enough. Never enough time, never enough resources, never enough of you as a teacher. You spend your whole career bumping up against those limits and figuring how to push them back or move around them. The preparation you get from your college just sort of plunks you down in the middle of that space, but it takes a lifetime to find the barriers, push the barriers, figure out how to stretch and simplify your practices so that you can get a little more accomplished.

So, no, you're not fully prepared. You're never fully prepared. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Your training is not to get you to the destination-- your training is to help you understand how to make the journey, a journey that you will never actually complete. And that's as ready as you're ever going to get.

Monday, August 27, 2018

How Deep the Data Mine

My health care provider is a little bit terrifying.

I live in Northwestern PA, which means my health care all occurs under the shadow of one of the most giant "on-profits" on the planet. Pittsburgh's main industry might once have been steel; now it's health care.

The behemoth is digitized to the max. I can get on line and order prescription refills, set up a doctor's appointment, and do all that annoying paperwork that you usually do on a clipboard balanced on your knee while sitting in the waiting room. But to do all that, you need an account. So I went on line to set one up and now I feel... queasy.

Since the account is tied to my health care records and my various drug prescriptions, I needed to answer some security questions on the way in, and they were... well. Creepy.

What city is [my daughter's name] associated with? How much land does my house sit on? And something about my wife.

Mind you, these were multiple choice questions, and not questions I had previously provided the answers to. The system already knew where my daughter lives and how big my property is. This is a system that has already collected all my medical information; it knows that I had my appendix out fifty years ago, and it knows that I was once on valium (but not why-- I had hiccups for three days straight, which is not nearly as funny as it sounds).

It's a deep thorough data mine, and I will confess that I have mixed feelings about it. I'd just as soon that, should a medical emergency occur, my health care provider knows something about my history. I appreciate the convenience of not having to call the doctor's office for little things like prescription refills.

But there is so much data there.

Honestly, part of how I deal with the reality of data mining is age-- I'm old enough that it's already too late to collect data on my third grade achievement tests and the time I got paddled in sixth grade and the time I split open my knee. I can almost-- almost-- make my peace with giant data mine because I've mostly-- mostly-- escaped.

But my twins are not even two years old yet, and I worry about the giant assortment of data-gathering machinery arrayed against them, the many fights going on to hold it back. I worry about a huge unelected system that is unaccountable to anyone and yet is far from dependable (click here to read the story of how my ex-wife's mail gets delivered to me). I worry about who will have access, who will be sold access, and what sort of decisions will be made about my children and grandchildren's lives based on that giant pile of sort-of-accurate, previously-considered-nobody's-business data.

We mostly live with this without thinking about it, and then every once in a while something comes along to remind you just how much your digital record knows about you.

My health care provider, just like my twins' future schools, has the opportunity to collect deep and deeply personal data. There are so many dangers that go with that, from misuse of the data to theft of the data to use of the data against my own best interests. And my health care provider is a super-rich behemoth, which is in a way comforting because what would happen if my data was held by a poor-struggling institution looking for any kind of revenue-generating scheme to survive?

I don't think there's a more critical issue in our world about which there has been less discussion-- which is just how our Data Overlords like it. The mines have been dug really deep, and we continue to dance around on the surface, happily oblivious to just how much ground has been dug out from under us.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Opportunity Costs Are Shot

Transcript of school staff meeting.

Principal: We've been handed a small pile of money, and I thought we'd meet to discuss what best to do with it.

Ms. Wattlestop: Well, we haven't replaced the textbooks in the science department for a decade. It might be time to get the students some books that aren't falling apart. And maybe we could get enough of them so that all students can have them.

Miss Bowenflava: The heat in my room doesn't work. The faucets in the student restrooms don't turn all the way on or off. There's a leak in the roof over the west hall. We need to get some repairs done around the building.

Mr. Jones: How big a pile are we talking? Because we could add a couple of staff people, we could get class sizes down below thirty, and that would be a huge help to the students.

Mrs. McSmith: We haven't put a new book in the library in fifteen years. Let's buy books.

Mrs. Galumpke: There are so many cool new programs out there that would really be exciting and helpful for our students. Maybe we could get one of those...?

Mr. O'Plenty: Our computer system is dependent on servers that are held together with duct tape and bubble. Let's strengthen our tech system

Ms. Stengle: Hiring some to run an after-school intervention program would really help our students who are behind.

Ms. Flex: You want to help me out with some of the $1,200 I'm spending to get my classroom necessary resources?

Miss Fleagle: There are only two certified people who will even think about substituting here. Maybe we could raise sub pay.

Miss Arbuckle: We could pilot an home and school visiting program, to help give at risk students a little more support.

Ms. Swayne: We could hire a counselor.

Mr. Flurgle: I don't want to sound selfish, but we don't even pay teachers a living wage any more, and I think it's beginning to affect the hiring possibilities[indicates the forty-three empty chairs at the meeting]. Maybe it's time to look at that.

Ms. Teanuttle: Really, it's the whole package. Our students are dealing with a wide variety of traumas and issues that they bring into the building, and we need to be doing more to help them both academically and emotionally. The building is falling down around our ears, and we desperately need more and better resources. The staff is being eroded by the lack of support and the absence of resources. And we are consistently underfunded because the state doesn't even want to give us enough money to keep up with providing the basics for our students. I hope you've been given enough money to do all of this, but if you haven't-- well, I really don't envy you this difficult decision.

Principal: Those are all very good ideas, and after careful consideration, I've decided we need to spend the money to buy some guns.

Staff: What?

Principal: Yup. Of all the things we could do, I think arm a couple of you guys would be the best possible use of the money. Thanks for coming.

Mr. Flurgle: Money for training us, too?

Principal. No. No, just the guns. Just point and shoot. How hard can it be?

Ms. Flex: But what about all these other ideas?

Principal: Trust me. Once you've got that gun in your hand, you won't even care about the rest of this stuff.

Mr. Jones: The opportunity cost here is just so tremendous!

Principal: The what now?

Mr. Jones: Never mind, Principal DeVos.

ICYMI: New School Year Edition (8/26)

In my neck of the woods it's that time again, and my wife is all set and ready to go. But in the meantime, here's some reading for you today.

Mission Accomplished

Privileged policies to privilege the already privileged. An important read.

Vouchers Are a Failed Experiment

I always appreciate it when someone outside the education debates world figures it out.

Success Academy Slashes Special Needs Classes

Oh, those pesky students with special needs. Leonie Haimson spots Eva Moskowitz cutting corners again

How Newarks Former Schools Chief Used a Victory Lap and Paid Consultants To Secure His Legacy

From Chalkbeat, a look at how a reformster used a pile of money to do PR for himself.

Mainstream Journalism Can't Handle the Truth

Paul Thomas explains how journalism is doomed to fail in covering education.

Response To Intervention's Role in the Texas Special Education Scandal

I definitely don't say it often enough-- you should read Nancy Bailey regularly. Here she drills down and looks at some of the detail behind the Texas plan to cut special ed costs by just not giving services to students who need them.

Beware Rich People Who Say They Want To Change the World

From the New York Times, a blistering look at the modern world of fauxlanthropy-- and yes, that includes education.


Friday, August 24, 2018

Can Scott Wagner Buy PA?

We'll be talking about Scott Wagner often in the months ahead, because he's running for Governor of Pennsylvania, and it would really be better for the Commonwealth if he did not succeed.

There are many things to know about Scott Wagner. People like to note that he has explained global warming-- it's either that the earth is moving closer to the sun, or possibly all those humans giving off body heat. He's a wealthy business man who has launched several businesses, but it's the trash biz that really made him wealthy. He's anti-union, and pretty sure that poor people are poor because they're lazy.

This frickin' guy

He recently made it clear that he would not be releasing his financials. His reason is simple-- he doesn't want his employees to know how much he makes because they might get the crazy idea that they should be paid more.

Wagner is a Cinderella story of sorts-- he made it to the PA Senate by beating both the GOP and Democratic candidate with write in votes. Granted, the voter turnout no more than 17%, but the GOP went from trying to box him out of the race to embracing him as a powerful new voice, and he quickly acquired clout in Harrisburg.

Some folks attribute that to a "no-nonsense style" with pronouncements like:

I'm gonna be sitting in the back of the room with a baseball bat. And leadership is gonna start doing things for [sic] Pennsylvania needs done.

Comments like that strike me as all-nonsense, but Wagner is one more millionaire who sells his common touch. It's part of his package, along with his multiple marriages and rocky personal history that his opponents have tried-- and failed-- to use against him (e.g. Wagner once had a protection abuse order brought against him by a daughter for choking her-- they are now tight and she works on his campaign).

But Wagner has another not-so-common touch feature-- he throws around a lot of money.

Wagner may seem like a political novice, but he was in the game well before he ran for Senator. The York Daily Record (his home town paper) figured in 2016 that since 2007, Wagner had spent more than $3.2 million dollars on political races. The 49th state Senate race in Erie County resulted in a seat flipped from Democratic to Republican; Wagner was the single largest contributor with a whopping $595,250 spent on the race. And he has spent aggressively on primary races, to make sure that the Right Kind of Republican is elected.

Wagner has spent more than $100,000 on several causes, including individual campaigns and to several PACs, including one that he's set up on his own and another that aims specifically to end teacher pensions in PA (you'll be unshocked to know that Wagner also opposes teacher tenure and other job protections). He hates taxes, and he wants Pennsylvania to be organized around what businesses want, and he has thrown a lot of money at campaigns for those causes.

At the same time, Wagner has become more pragmatic. Where he once railed against lobbying firms-- particularly those that served as PR firms for the campaigns of officials they would later lobby-- he now employs exactly that kind of firm. If you want to take over the state government, you have to be willing to pay up. Wagner promised he would throw seven figures worth of his money at the campaign, and there's no reason to doubt him.

Wagner is as clear an anti-labor, pro-rich guy candidate as you're going to find. He's a fan of Trump and Scott Walker. He hates unions, particularly the teacher union, and would like to gut them from every possible angle. He's a very rich guy who thinks that his money should give him the power to reshape the state to suit his own preferences. If you care about teachers or public education, it is not too early to start working to support Governor Tom Wolf.

Where Are The Russian Ed Bots?

So it turns out that the Russian bots haven't just been messing with us politically; according to research from George Washington University, the Russian bots have been busy trying to sow discord among US citizens on the subject of vaccinations.

If you've never wandered into the middle of a bot attack, well, all you really need to do is log in to Twitter and shoot your mouth off to someone with a high profile about a hot political topic. I don't know for certain that I've been a guest at a bot party, but once, after I posted about the need to abolish ICE in a conversation, my feed was flooded with aggressively attacking tweeters about half of whom had only been on Twitter for a day or two.

As our understanding of Russian bot farms grows, it becomes obvious that they are playing both sides of any topic that Americans like to argue about. Some folks argue that the Russians wanted to elect Trump President. I don't know if that's true; I suspect they mostly just wanted to make the election as divisive as possible. So it makes sense that they would also try to aggravate other contentious issues, because social media have made us cranky (I once received Very Cranky comments for making fun of Flat Earthers). Every one of us has had that kid in class-- he doesn't care what side wins, but he's going to jab folks into arguing just so he can spread chaos and keep class from happening.

But if the bots are everywhere, where is education's share?

Where are our Russian ed bots?

I know plenty of cranky posters from all sides of the debate, but I have ample evidence that they are real people. I've actually met some of them. I've seen them on videos. And they manage rants far longer than 280 characters.

I'm not sure they're always clearly labeled.
So why aren't the education debates being goosed by the Russians? Why aren't we a sufficiently agitating wedge issue?

There are a couple of answers, all a little depressing.

One is that they're here, and we just haven't noticed. I'll bet they were humming for a while back in the crazy Common Core debate days. I guess I'm going to start paying closer attention.

Another possibility is the educational debates are so arcane and wonky that bots just can't handle them.

Yet another possibility is that the Russians themselves have decided that education just isn't a very big issue. They've looked and all they see is a handful of people who really, really care about this stuff, while the vast majority of the US population continues to not bother with education all that much. This is sadly possible. Education is no longer a "topic" in news media, and folks who have tried to launch super-influential websites (like Campbell Brown) or Presidential campaigns (like Jeb Bush) based on education issues have been disappointed and largely ignored. Yes, Betsy DeVos is widely known and belittled, but mostly all anyone has absorbed is the idea that she's rich and dumb; vanishing few mainstream critiques of DeVos include any intelligent observations about her actual education policies.

We all kind of know this. Whatever side of the education debates you're on, you know that huge numbers of people aren't that concerned, that to even have the conversation you're going to have to explain all sorts of things because they haven't been paying attention to education for the last decade. It becomes really striking when an education story actually flares up, and suddenly people are noticing state-wide teacher strikes.

The explanation that I'll cling to is that most education issues can't be easily reduced to snappy tweet and dumb memes. "We're just too smart for those dumb bot farms" is better for the self-esteem. But the vaccination story is a reminder that any debate in the US is susceptible to being blown up by folks who just want to watch the world-- or at least one hemisphere of it-- burn. It's a reminder that in any online debate, it's best to think before you engage. Not every comment deserves a response.

Running Them In

After a baby-induced sabbatical, my wife has returned to running. Her first post-baby 5K was a couple of weekends ago, taking us back to a world we've spent lots of time in. And yes, she ran pushing the twins, because she's that adorable.

Many of the same old faces were there. We don't live in a huge area, and if you run the 5K circuit, you see many of the same runners race after race (you also, if you're the guy who waits supportively for his spouse, see many of the same supportive faces race after race). I ran years ago, but plantars facitis sucks, so I stopped.

My wife and the Board of Directors get ready to roll.
There's one runner I've watched for years who I find fascinating and inspirational. He usually finished toward the front of the race, though he doesn't win often. But as soon as he crosses the finish line, he circles around and goes back up the course. He'll meet other runners as they approach the final stretch, and he'll run with them (he's not the only person to do this, but he's the one I see always doing it). He may shout encouragement at them, he may cheer for them, he may just run silently beside them. But he runs them the rest of the way in.

Over and over and over, until I swear he has essentially run the whole race twice, he runs out, looks for someone who can use a hand, and runs them in. And he seems to be able to gauge what sort of coaching do they need-- support? a little kick in the butt? silence? chatter? a boost to come in strong, or just enough support to make it across the line?

I'm always moved by this display. Running is a tough sport, but every race is a reminder in many ways that competition doesn't have to be cutthroat. And in the average 5K, you'll see everything from people who train relentlessly and seriously to people who are just giving it a try. This guy runs with all of them.

It's not a perfect analogy for teaching, but it still strikes a chord-- reaching out to help people who are trying to meet their own personal goals, whether it's to beat their own personal best or just to finish. There's no judginess at these events; spectators and finished runners don't stand on the final stretch and holler "Loser!" or "Sad!" or "You need a remedial running class" at people who are struggling to some in at the back of the pack. The assumption is that everyone is just trying to do the best they can, and that making the attempt is deserving of support and a cheer. It's not that the race doesn't separate folks into winners and losers-- it absolutely does-- but it doesn't make winning and losing indicative of anything else. Maybe you ran the 5K in more time than another person did; that doesn't mean anything about your worth as a human being or your right to take up space on the planet or how deserving you are of help or support or love. I can't imagine that the races would better or faster if the runners and the crowd were harsh, cruel, trying to threaten runners with dire consequences if they didn't hit the mark.

The race is hard. You ran the best you could. Good for you.

And at the end, we cheer you on, maybe even run you in so that you cross that line with someone by your side, because runners run against each other, but they run with each other, too. They work to make the mark, to overcome the obstacle together, all the way to the end. School, I think, ought to feel more like that.

Thursday, August 23, 2018

IL: Another Voucher Program Launched

This fall, Illinois is launching a hot new neo-voucher program. The Invest in Kids program is a tax credit shell game that allows the state to funnel public tax dollars to private religious schools. This was Governor Bruce Rauner's idea of how to fix Illinois's school funding, which is a little like fixing your house by moving into an apartment. Rauner is not a friend of public education.

The program is somewhere between the standard voucher set-up and the upper-voucher system of an Education Savings Account. In Illinois, people can contribute money toward a school "scholarship," which counts as a 75% tax credit for the donor. If I owe the state $1,236 dollars in taxes and I give $1,200 to a "scholarship" fund, I now owe the state $336 in taxes. Under this system, the money is never in the state's hands, so the program is safe from that whole church-state separation thing. The state, however, does end up with less money, so public schools still come up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop on this deal.

The whole business has been controversial (it took three roll call votes to pass the measure). But while voucher schemes have been regularly struck down, tax credit systems (Illinois actually already has one for school supplies) have held up well in court under multiple challenges. Studies so far show that voucher systems (whatever they're called) actually provide poorer results, but as usual that's using test scores as the measure, so honestly, we don't really know, and many Reformsters have shifted from "vouchers will get better results" to "freedom is the most important thing." And controversial or not, at $75 million it appears to be the biggest launch of such a program (Florida's tax credit voucher dodge is now huge, but it started at a modest $50 million.)

Last week WBEZ took a look at the private school scholarships and discovered "12 Things We Should Have Known..." as a way to see exactly where Illinois has now landed. Some of these are "should have knowns" in the sense that, yes, if you had been paying attention, you would have known this before now. For instance, there's really no excuse for only now realizing that tax credits are a way to get around the law against state-funded religious schools. The law has also been pretty clear that these "scholarships" are not just for poor kids-- a family of four at 300% of the poverty level ($75,300) are eligible for up to $12,973 (that's a very hefty sum compared to most voucher and neo-voucher programs. But some of these details show how Illinois is growing this beast.

For one thing, the cap on how big a credit taxpayers can take is huge. Huge! Illinois taxpayers can get up to a cool million in tax credits.

As has been the case elsewhere, some number of voucher-- I mean, "scholarship" recipients were enrolled in private school anyway. In other words, some of the money drained from public schools had absolutely no corresponding reduction in enrollment or expenses. But it's hard to know exactly how many because...

The organizations granting these scholarships are allowed to operate with zero transparency. There's some basic info they must report (which is good-- the last time an expansion of this sort of thing was proposed in Pennsylvania, nobody had any oversight over any part of the whole business), but donors remain secret, and even basic information about students like where they live is also hidden. In Illinois, even charter schools are subject to FOIA-- but scholarship organizations are not.

24% of the money in the program came from eight donors. 73% of the money will be funneled through a single organization (Empower Illinois). It's only fair that Empower Illinois has the majority of the business, because they wrote the law in the first place, having gathered up some clout partnering with the Catholic Church, which, of course, gets a huge windfall out of this whole system. What does Empower Illinois get out of this? Well, they get to keep 5% of all donations. WBEZ says the group has taken in $30.8 million on contributions, which means a $1.5 million payday for them.  Ka-ching.

Interesting detail-- the donor can designate the school for the "scholarship." That means that a family might have their eye on one particular school, but there may be limited scholarship money for that particular school. That also means that as the owner/operator of a particular private school, you could use this system to pump up your own school's finances while giving yourself a tasty tax break. Or, if you were a staunch Catholic, you could pump up your favorite parochial school (while tax breaking yourself). At any rate, Catholic schools are enjoying a big windfall thanks to these "scholarships." But I'm wondering which rich people would earmark their scholarship money for schools serving the kind of poor neighborhoods they would never set foot in.

Finally, no state that instituted a tax credit program like this has ever ended it-- but education could be an election issue in Illinois, where Democratic candidate for governor J. B. Pritzker has said he would put an end to the program. Which means that Pritzker has made an enemy of the Catholic Church, and Chicago Cardinal Blasé Cupich, who backed this program big time.

Time will tell just how much damage this program will do to public schools and the students who need to get an education there. Or maybe it will just drain enough resources from the public system that developers can get their hands on more upscale apartment real estate conversion material in Chicago.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

The City Fund Plans To Conquer The Market

What happens when a bunch of Reformsters decide to get the band back together to see if they can't privatize public ed more successfully this time around? You get The City Fund, a group that has just inadvertently leaked its plans for a hostile takeover of 5% of the US education system.

For a thorough back-ground on this hot new reform group, check out this piece by Thomas Ultican. I'll hit the highlights, and then we'll talk about the big scoop that Matt Barnum tossed out into a giant shitstorm of a new cycle this afternoon.

The City Fund is collecting a giant pot of money to help launch more "educational opportunity for all children." Specifically, they want to boost the portfolio model of ed reform on several cities. It's a bold choice, because not everybody thinks the portfolio model is a great idea, and that includes plenty of people in the reform camp. The portfolio model is basically an approach that throws together public, charter, and even private schools that want to play. All these schools get tossed into one super-district that is under the watchful eye of a centralized quality control system. Periodically the portfolio managers dump the losers and beef up the winners and let some more join the gamer. That's right- "portfolio" here is not borrowed from the world of art so much as the world of investment management.

Reformsters like the model because it replaces the locally elected school board with a Portfolio Manager, and it essentially puts the public schools on equal footing with charter schools. Free market fans think this is a great way to put everyone under the thumb of the invisible hand. But other Reformsters see the portfolio as working pretty much like a school district, which they already don't like. And centralizing all that oversight in a PM runs the risk of getting someone in that job who is not a big charter and choice fan. And, of course, the whole structure depends on the same old crappy test score system to identify good schools and bad schools.

Nevertheless, The City Fund is banking on that model. Who are the players making this bold choice? There are lots of familiar names here.

There's Neerav Kingsland, the Yale Law School grad who oversaw the conversion of New Orleans into a charter district (as you may have heard, there's some debate over just how successful that really was). Since then, he's become an education investment guru for various big money funds.

Kevin Huffman, who went straight from Teach For America to running the school system of Tennessee.

Chris Barbic (also TFA) was brought into Tennessee by Huffman to run the Achievement School District. The promise was that the bottom 5% of schools would become part of the top 25% in just five years. They did not even come close, and Barbic left the job having concluded that "achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment."

David Harris previously led the Mind Trust in Indiana, a charter school incubator. And Ethan  Gray is the head of Education Cities, another choice promoter with affection for the portfolio model.

Kicking in some big bucks are one of Kingsland's current employers, the Arnold Fund. Reed Hastings has also kicked in. The Netflix mogul, like Kingsland, has argued that elected school boards need to be eliminated so that schools can be run more like a business. The Hastings Fund and the omnipresent Gates Foundation have also kicked in. All the sources have not yet been revealed, but City Fund has raised a whopping 200 million. And as of yesterday afternoon, we have a clearer picture of what they have in mind.

While the rest of the country was watching the latest episode of "That Darn President," Matt Barnum was revealing that he'd gotten his hands on a City Fund presentation for investors. You should read the whole thing, but here are the broad strokes.

They want to spread the Denver, DC and New Orleans model. This is problematic; DC and New Orleans are not exactly synonymous with unqualified reformster success.

They reject many reformy standard ideas. "Very little work in education reform," Barnum says is the first line of the presentation.

But most extraordinary is their goal. Remember when Eli Broad announced he was going to take over half the LA school system? City Fund wants to move its charterized system into forty cities over the next ten years, grabbing 30-50% of the students in each city. "Our goal," Barnum quotes the presentation, "is to make the model normal."

Barnum lays out their ambitious timeline:

Between 2018 and 2021, it hopes to have success in at least 20 cities, affecting around one million students. Specifically, their goal is for 10 cities to have fully adopted the model, and 10 more to be making progress.

From 2022 on, the group hopes to influence “every major city in America,” growing by a couple of cities each year, the presentation says. (“If I had to rewrite that slide I would say, ‘if evidence and demand follows,’” Kingsland said in an interview. “We really aren’t going to expand if the evidence isn’t there.”) 

How to do it? The City Fund plans to use speakers, blog posts, "partnering" with groups, and lots and lots of money-- as much as $15 to $20 million over the first three years.

The City Fund is a new organization (still without a web site) but they have the players and the money to become a major factor in ed erform in the forty targeted cities. Do you want your city's ed system remade in the image of New Orleans or DC?  Keep your eyes peeled.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Still More Testing for Littles

If you don't spend time in the world of elementary education, you may not be familiar with DIBELS. DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills) were created and marketed as a test of early literacy skills. They were tied to the Reading First initiative, a federal program that was mandated under No Child Left Behind.

To grossly over-simplify, reading instruction is the scene of an eternal war between two schools of thought. On one side, we have the content folks (how well you can read depends on your prior knowledge-- what you know) and on the other side, the mechanics folks (how well you can read depends on how well you can decode the marks on the page, a content-independent skill set). DIBELS, like most of the initiatives from NCLB forward, leans toward the skills side. Its most famous contribution to the skills side is the nonsense word fluency portion of the test, in which small children children are asked to "read" nonsense syllables (e.g. zek, vad, nuf). There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding DIBELS, not the least of which surrounds the notion of giving formal testing to Kindergarten and First Grade students.

Do we need to teach 5- and 6-year-olds that school is a place you go to take tests? Do we need to start subjecting little ones to test anxiety? Do we need to teach small children that reading is something you do in order to pass tests rather than something that can be done for personal enjoyment and enrichment?

But if you've only just caught on to the debate about whether or not kindergarten should be the new first grade (or second grade), you should know that's old news. Because education reformers and test manufacturers have their sights set on pre-school students.

Dynamic Measurement Group, the folks who brought us DIBELS, are rolling out PELI, a pre-school literacy assessment for 3- to 5-year-olds. It will be available this coming year.
DMG notes that PELI "has been specifically designed to be used within an Outcomes-Driven Model of decision-making and is appropriate for use within a Response to Intervention service delivery model." Translated from corporate edspeak, that means basically, "We can use your child's score to decide that they need to get remedial classwork." Did I mention that this is for 3- to 5-year-olds?
DMG notes that PELI assessments are "efficient, engaging, cost-effective, standardized" on a list of descriptors that does not include "proven to be good for children."
DMG is not out there by themselves on this. The pressure to ramp up pre-school academics is building steadily (Do you need a practice test for your child's pre-school admission exam? Here its is.) This despite the lack of any research to suggest that such an emphasis actually works.
What evidence we have says that academic focus for littles is not just damaging, but counterproductive, leading to the opposite of what its proponents want to see. What we see over and over is that free play, not direct instruction, is what helps small children grow healthy, strong, smart, and with their curiosity still intact.
Continued calls for "high quality pre-school" keep leading us to the same issue-- how will we know they are high quality? The answer for far too many policy makers is "Well, give 'em a test!" This stimulates the manufacturers to create such tests, which in turn leads to the marketing of the tests.
The real danger is that young parents (remember, we're talking 3 to 5-year-olds here) will feel they need to take the word of "experts," asking teachers questions like "How was her test score" instead of asking the child "Did you have fun today? Are you happy?"
No shred of evidence suggests that the human race has evolved to the point that small children reach developmental milestones any faster or sooner than they did ten or fifty or a hundred years ago. There's no good reason to let tests like PELI occupy an important spot in the lives of littles.